In William Doub Bennett's book Currituck County,
North Carolina Eighteenth Century Tax & Militia Records. Baltimore: Clearfield Co., 1994,he describes
this map as: "Unknown - post 1770 -
A minute
and careful survey of the land north of Albemarle Sound. The names and
locations of landowners are given. May have been made during the Revolutionary
War period.” By 'unknown', Bennett is referring to the map maker.A photostatic copy
of this map is housed at the North Carolina Archives in the manuscript
department (Clinton Collection #293) with the notation "close to 1770, parts of
modern counties of Currituck, Camden, and Pasquotank".
The original map is located at the University of Michigan in the William
L. Clements Library. Essentially a book collector before the Library
opened in 1923, William L. Clements had acquired several notable atlases and
some exceedingly rare maps bound into books relating to the period of American
discovery and exploration. Shortly after the Library opened, Mr. Clements
turned his attention to acquiring manuscript collections of British military and
political figures active in American affairs between the 1750s and 1780s. Among
his greatest acquisitions were the papers of Generals Thomas Gage and Henry
Clinton, Lord Shelburne, and Lord George Germain. With each of these massive
collections came hundreds of individual manuscript and printed maps of the
American colonies, frontier fortifications, and battle plans from the French and
Indian and Revolutionary Wars. These collections became a part of the Library's
holdings with the settlement of the Clements estate in 1937.This map
(which seemed to be unfinished or a partial of a larger map) was scanned and sent to me in two sections--both
huge and too large to put on one page. I've made sections of the map
hoping that none of them will be too big to download on your computers.
Some of the sections will overlap. The reason for making each section of
the map so large is because there are many landowner's surnames (sorry, no first names)
listed and in order to read them the images had to be fairly large. The
main roads are seen as small dotted lines and don't seem to have changed
drastically in the past 225 years. You will have to scroll across
some of the pages to view different sections of the image. A few of the
names may be illegible but for the most part they are fairly clear. Not
all of Currituck County was on this map. Sadly, the outer banks region is
totally missing. The upper right-hand side of the map deals solely with
Currituck Co.; the left-hand side with Camden and Pasquotank counties.
Marty Holland offers this information: "If you trace the North
River all the way north to its narrowest point, everything to the east is
Currituck and west is Camden. If the map was made prior to 1777, then
everything west of the North River was Pasquotank. At the end of the
narrowest part of the North River (where you see the names Grandy, Sawyer,
Dosier, Sawyer, Bell, Sawyer, Sawyer running down the west side - see
images #2 &#4), the
dividing line continues to run in a straight northwesterly direction until
it intersects with the Virginia border. So there is just a big swampy
area in the northwestern part of Currituck. As far as I can tell, the
names that are west of Moyock (on the northern part of the map) are all
across the border in Camden. I think this is the area that is now called
South Mills." Below I've tried to piece together, as best I could,
the two scans sent to me so you would have an idea of what the actual map looked
like. There is also a table with links to each of the sections.